I wanted to like this because I love horrible things happening on spaceships, but Far From the Light of Heaven really left so little impression on me. Really "go girl give us nothing" as a book for me. 

To start with, I just didn't connect with the characters at all, for a few reasons: the writing felt flat and like it kept me at a distance from the story itself, we're just handed a couple of pieces of background for each of them without really getting any compelling demonstrations of how it shapes their motivations, and most of all we just kept getting new POVs throughout and skipping around too much for me to really care about anyone. Despite being the main character, Shell really felt like such a minor part of the story and I never really got into her head the way I would've loved. Another big problem for me is that this book isn't just unsatisfying as a space-survival story, because I didn't care about any of the characters enough to worry about them dying, but it also fails as a murder mystery in my opinion. The whole point of a mystery is trying to solve it as a reader myself, or at the very least get to have a moment of satisfaction when all these separate pieces come together in a cohesive conclusion, and that is NOT what we got here.

What do you MEAN the murderer is some completely random guy we've literally never met before this??? His reasons for being there are pretty interesting, but they're just dropped in through his point of view pretty late in the book, without exploring it fully or feeling like it really even mattered.

 

So much of the writing in this book just felt flat and distant and I just couldn't get into it. Another issue was the worldbuilding. There were a lot of cool elements thrown in, like the androids, aliens, the released wildlife all over the ship, the Lagos space station itself--but none of these were given enough detail or exploration. This is just my issue as a reader, but I DO want a bunch of paragraphs on how space plants work or what daily life looks like on the giant space station, and we got some technical detail but not in the way I wanted. Also, it really just felt like things kept happening to the characters without them driving the plot.

I know lots of people love this author's work, and he has a really interesting concept here, but so many different elements of this book fell flat for me. I was reading it to be finished with it and not because I wanted to be reading it.